The present invention relates to magnetic tape drives.
The growing volume of data, and the storage capacity to service IT have increased tremendously in the last few years. It is expected that this will affect the way how to plan storage strategies, besides other significant trends, including increasing data migration to cloud services, storage virtualization, deduplication, and automatic tiering. For example, a major cloud service provider is now switching to tape technology. Contemporary tape library systems include up to 128 tape drives, hosting more than 23.000 cartridges.
A tape storage provider's responsibility requires ensuring that customer data will be accessible at any time without any error impact to the greatest possible extent. However, more and more tape drive head problems show up due to the surface roughness of the tape media surface, which is caused by the curing process during manufacturing. The surface of “green media” (i.e. fresh, unused media) can be considered as acting like sandpaper, which is exceptionally harmful for the tape head elements.
Therefore, tape media surfaces, especially “green media” surfaces, lead to shortened tape head life due to abrasion of the read/write and servo elements when such rough media has been used on the tape head. The effect is exacerbated for some backup or archiving applications which require certain data to be stored on “green media”, and for tape drives in a library which are provisioned for dealing predominantly with “green media”.